CENTRAL AFRICA NEITHER JAILS NOR BULLETS WILL HALT

By G. Gale I WENT to a meeting on “The Crisis in Central Africa’ very reluctantly, expecting to hear a few dozen more platitudes about ‘tolerance’, ‘gradualism’ and how to be kind to ‘our poor coloured brothers’.

It was a refreshing change to hear Mr Joshua Nkomo. president of the Southern Rhodesia African National Congress.

Five hundred of Mr Nkomo’s countrymen have been imprisoned without trial by the white supremacists. After they were imprisoned, laws were introduced legalizing their imprisonment.

And when their five years are up they can be jailed for Africans’.

Jail for ‘msolent behaviour’

Other new laws make Africans liable for imprisonment without trial for ‘insolent behaviour’ to government officials. They can also be put away without trial if it is considered that they ‘might be likely’ to cause trouble.

Mr Nkomo himself is liable to a total of twenty-five years’ imprisonment without trial if he returns to Southern Rhodesia.

The Africans have been accused of ‘subversive behaviour’. Mr Nkomo explained what this meant.

For an African to want land was ‘subversive’; to want the vote was ‘subversive’; and to suggest that Africans were just as human as the whites was the most ‘subversive’ of all.

Africans were accused of using undemocratic methods. But the vote was confined to those who owned £1,000-worth of movable property, or who had a minimum income of £60 per month.

’ The minimum wage for a white man was £65 per month; for an African it was £6 10s. per month.

The only way to raise wages was by trade union activity.

But. Africans were not allowed to form trade unions.

Africans were not impressed by talk of ‘partnership’. . The Africans were always very much the junior partner in all these schemes. ‘Paktnership’ was another. way of saying ‘apartheid’. They did not want ‘generosity’. They were prepared to accept Europeans in their land, but.as equals.

Nor would they be satisfied with ‘gradualism’, : Africans wanted freedom, and they wanted'it now.

Lord Perth had said that the European settlers ‘are us’. Another noble lord had said that all Africans were liars. It was up to the British people, and especially the British workers, to decide whose side they were on. — Neither bullets nor imprisonment without trial would deter the Africans. The future of Britain was tied up with their struggle.

iy May.16, 1959 military intrigue against the. old semi-feudal régime.

The most dangerous line for the immediate future will be if the workers’ parties say: ‘The Nasser supporters in Iraq, together with western imperialism, are the immediate enemy; therefore we must above all not embarrass our allies, Kassem and his friends.’

If this is done, the same sort of tears will be shed over Kassem’s ‘ingratitude’ next year as are falling on account of Nasser in 1959, In China in 1927 events unfolded in almost exactly the same way. Chiang Kai-shek led the nationalist (Kuomintang) armies against the foreign imperialists. In order to preserve ‘unity’ the Communist Party discouraged the demands of the rank and file for land reform, the arming of picket squads and the setting up of workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ councils to run the country and the factories.

Eventually, in Shanghai and-Canton, the ‘national hero’ Chiang Kai-shek turned on the working class in one of the bloodiest massacres of revolutionary history.

Later still-of course he fought—and still fights—for the